Unofficial news and tips about Google

August 13, 2011

Google Highlights Pages that Include Search Results

Some think that search engines shouldn't index pages that include search results. Why clutter the results with pages that show another list of results when you could send users to the most relevant pages?

In some cases, search results pages are useful, but it's a good idea to know in advance that a page only includes search results. Google started to show a label like "Matches 1-50 of 100", "Results 1-24 of 56" or "33 results" next to the snippets. For example, an Amazon page that includes a list of Star Wars-related products shows this label.

5 comments:

I find this to be a very strange thing for Google to do. My objective when doing a search is to find what I'm looking for as quickly as possible, and this adds (at least) one more click to the process. I wrote about my thoughts on the subject a few days ago at http://robcroll.com/bouncing-around-the-serps.

Some of us "think" ? No, we know. Is a fact, ever since Google started polluting the results with MORE search result sites, the real results completely fade. (Not to mention, the results in the other results are irrelevant...

Surely whether it is good or bad is dependent on the query. Some queries are probably a request for a single result such as "mojito cocktail recipe" or "iphone 4". But MANY other queries are better matched to a category page or some sort of navigational page that will lead you towards sub-pages.

Examples include "rum drinks" where the user probably wants to see a list of drinks or "iphone cases" where once again the desired result is probably a list of products. In these situations it makes perfect sense for them to return some sort of paginated result and to point out how many items are included.